Clarkson said if he had known that the story was about to appear he would have taken out an injunction "in a heartbeat". He said his children, aged 12, 15, and 16, had been shocked to see newspaper headlines the next day reporting on the Twitter allegations.

Previous reports have suggested that Clarkson had an affair with a Top Gear television executive.

Both Clarkson and Miss Khan used newspaper columns to support the new injunctions, which are brought on the basis of European human rights legislation.

"It is said only the rich and famous can afford a gagging order. But only the rich and famous ever need one," Clarkson wrote.

The previous day he described, in a sombre column in a daily tabloid, his move into an unfurnished flat in Bayswater, central London.

Clarkson lives with his wife, Frances, in a £2million home in the Cotswolds, and the couple insisted that the flat in London was for use only while filming for the BBC in London.

Miss Khan broke the news that she and Clarkson had been wrongly accused on the Twitter website.

Clarkson said he knew Miss Khan well and had been out for dinner with her and his wife the night before the rumour broke. But he said: "We have never been alone together. There are no intimate photographs. The end."

He claimed that if the injunctions were dropped it would be a "charter for lunatics and blackmailers to do and say pretty well whatever took their fancy."

Clarkson added: "I am not a saint. And as I'm in the pay of the BBC – a publicly funded body – it might seem reasonable for newspapers to question some of my lifestyle choices. But they wouldn't question them. They'd demand that I be sacked."

In a column the previous day, he mused about the difficulties of moving into an unfurnished flat.

"In recent times, I have become so fed up with everything I own that I started to think seriously about what life would be like without any of it," he said.

"So, when I moved recently into an unfurnished flat I spent the first evening sitting on the floor, wondering what is essential and what, really, is not."

He admitted that he had never used a washing machine but said he would definitely need a coffee machine, a television and a PlayStation games console because "I can't really live unless I spend at least an hour a day shooting Nazi zombies in the face."

He added: "And I'd need some pornography as well so that would mean I'd need an internet. Which would mean some Wi–Fi."

After ranting about how all the electronic equipment he bought did not work properly, he signed off: "If you do lose your job and you end up living in a barn, with just a fire to keep you warm and nothing to eat but what you can find in a hedge, be happy. Because you'll be having a much better life than me."